The Last Days of John Lennon

by James Patterson

  In the early afternoon, he is given a bulletproof vest.

  He understands its significance. The vest, however, won’t protect him from a head shot. There could be one or more snipers waiting for him outside.

  It’s not out of the realm of possibility. People in this city are crazy.

  After he slips on the vest, he is handcuffed and led through a phalanx of armed cops. The faces watching him are not friendly.

  The police, he knows, are openly calling him a wacko in the press. Others are quoted as saying he is a “loner” who “had a screw loose.”

  They put a jacket over his head and lead him outside, into a riot of howls, rage, and raised voices that drill into his ears. The cops escorting him dig their fingers deeper into his arms. Eyes on the ground, he sways back and forth as police around him push forward, through the crush of media. Flashbulbs go off like machine-gun fire. TV cameras, he’s sure, are everywhere.

  People scream “killer” and “monster” and “loser.”

  Someone yells, “I hope you rot in hell!”

  Another: “I’m going to kill you, Chapman!”

  Closer is another set of voices that belong to reporters shouting questions they hope he’ll answer so that they, too, can get the inside scoop and become famous.

  Everyone here is shouting his name.

  Everyone on the planet now knows who he is. Like John Lennon and Jesus Christ, he has done what few people in this world are able to do.

  He has left his mark. He will be remembered. Always and forever. Eternal.

  He smiles underneath the jacket.

  He is treated to the same grand reception at the courthouse. Inside, he is ushered into a soundproof pen to meet his court-appointed lawyer.

  His name is Herbert Adlerberg. He has represented highly unpopular defendants in high-profile cases before, including members of the Black Liberation Army, who were accused of terrorism and murdering police officers in the early 1970s, and the Harlem Six, a group of youths charged in a race-fueled double murder in 1964.

  The courtroom is absolutely packed. Every single person is looking at him. Pens are scribbling furiously across notepads. Blinking back tears of joy, he takes a seat next to his lawyer.

  Adlerberg asks to have him committed to a mental hospital. Assistant district attorney Kim Hogrefe asks that he be held without bail and sent to Rikers Island.

  “He committed a deliberate, premeditated execution of John Lennon,” Hogrefe tells the court, “and acted in a cool, calm, and calculated manner in killing Mr. Lennon by shooting him several times with a .38-caliber pistol.”

  Adlerberg tells Judge Martin Rettinger that he, Mark David Chapman, twice tried to kill himself.

  The judge consents to Adlerberg’s request. Mark is sent to Bellevue Hospital for psychological examination.

  The psychiatrist at the hospital, Dr. Naomi Goldstein, seems pleasant enough.

  They talk. A lot.

  It’s so interesting to have people not only listen to him but also hang on his every word, analyzing its significance, weighing its importance.

  He knows they’re trying to decide whether he’s sane.

  Shortly thereafter, Mark is told that his attorney has decided to quit. Apparently, Adlerberg has received many death threats. Several promise to have him lynched.

  His new lawyer, Jonathan Marks, can stomach fear. Most important, the man lusts for the limelight.

  He’ll do just fine.

  Mark begins to confide in his attorney. The young Harvard Law School graduate and former assistant US attorney in Brooklyn listens intently.

  There are reports that grieving Lennon fans are planning to storm Bellevue. The hospital can’t protect him, so he’s transferred to Rikers Island. He refuses to eat, fearing he’ll be poisoned. The windows in his room are painted black. The prison is worried about snipers.

  Alone in his cell, he thinks strategy.

  “People are always eager to move on to the next bright, shiny object.”

  That won’t be the case with me. I’m going to shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun.

  Chapter 68

  Hey, kid, rock and roll

  Rock on.

  —“Rock On”

  On Yoko’s orders, security expert Doug MacDougall has taken charge of John’s remains. To confuse the press, the bodyguard has deployed multiple decoy hearses from a funeral chapel on Madison Avenue. He brings John’s body to the crematory at Ferncliff Cemetery, in Hartsdale, New York, without being followed.

  Under cover of darkness, MacDougall returns to Studio One, carrying a large box wrapped with a big bow.

  “What’s that?” John’s assistant, Fred Seaman, asks.

  “That,” the bodyguard replies, “was the greatest rock musician in the world.”

  * * *

  Sean’s runny nose has spiked into a fever, and he’s been recovering in his bedroom. Yoko hasn’t been able to leave her room for days, so she sends the nanny to bring the boy to her.

  “Why’s Julian here? Where’s Dad?” he’s been asking. Sean approaches Yoko’s bed, which is strewn with blankets and newspapers. At five years old, he’s just learning to read, but he sees the letters l-e-n-n-o-n repeated over and over.

  “Your dad’s dead,” Yoko tells him. “He’s been killed.” She doesn’t soften the truth.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” Sean says with age-defying wisdom. “You’re still young. You’ll find somebody.”

  “Well, I’m glad you feel that way about it,” she says.

  The pressure Sean’s feeling is too much. He runs to his room and cries.

  * * *

  “There is no funeral for John,” Yoko announces. “John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him.”

  She scatters his ashes in a spot in Central Park that can be viewed from their apartment.

  “Maybe he is watching me from above,” Julian reflects. “It would be nice if he was. I guess I’ll find out someday.”

  Before dawn on Sunday, December 14, the first mourners begin to gather in Central Park for the silent vigil scheduled for 2:00 p.m. At that hour, one hundred thousand people stand with their heads bowed. The only sounds are the buzzing of news helicopters and the flapping of American flags lowered to half-staff.

  On a white poster board, one man has sandwiched a youthful photo of Lennon between two peace signs. The hand-lettered sign pleads, WHY?

  Mourners begin to disperse, spreading a trail of flowers in their wake. “The dream is over,” they sing, repeating the chorus from “God,” the song that climaxes John’s emotionally raw first solo album.

  “Now Daddy is part of God,” Sean tells his mother. “I guess when you die you become much bigger because you’re part of everything.”

  August 24, 1981

  Life has been good to him these past eight months.

  Wonderful, in fact. He has never slept better in his entire life.

  The psychiatrists retained by both sides can’t figure him out. They give conflicting reports, with defense experts declaring him to be mentally unfit and government experts rejecting his insanity claims. He is diagnosed by one defense doctor as a paranoid schizophrenic.

  It’s all quite entertaining.

  Prosecuting attorneys Kim Hogrefe and Allen Sullivan believe he is a coldhearted, calculated killer. Key to their case is the fact that he bought the gun in Hawaii, made multiple trips to New York, had the presence of mind to fly to Atlanta to buy bullets, and knew to smuggle the gun in his luggage so it would not be found.

  “If he was obsessed with anything, it was bringing attention to himself,” Hogrefe has said. “He was narcissistic, he was grandiose. He wanted to bring attention to himself. The fact that John Lennon was the victim here was simply because John Lennon was available, publicly available, and others were not.”

  Mark has an epiphany one night while sitting in a lounge at Rikers Island, watching a movie called The Bunker. It’s about the last days of Hit
ler. He talks about the movie with his defense attorney’s cocounselor, David Suggs.

  “It’s quite amazing, when you think about it,” Mark says.

  “I’m not following.”

  “Hitler. Look at what he was facing, and yet he did not give up his principles and his ideas.” Mark smiles. “And then it hit me, like a joyful thing, that I was called out for a special purpose, to promote the reading of the book.”

  Mark pens a letter to the New York Times. “It is my sincere belief that this written statement will not only stimulate the reading of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but will also help many to understand what has happened.”

  * * *

  A trial will bring lots of attention from around the world. He imagines people holding the book, waving and laughing and cheering. He shares his promotional plans with Bantam, the publisher of the paperback edition—and with psychiatrists.

  “Everyone will read The Catcher in the Rye,” he tells one psychiatrist. “The Catcher in the Rye will become the No. 1 best-seller and will probably become one of the biggest motion pictures in the history of literature.”

  He has the guards check the stock in bookstores. Some bring copies for him to sign. He signs them all the same way: “Mark Chapman, the Catcher in the Rye.”

  Two weeks before the date set for his trial, he tears up his copy of The Catcher in the Rye and tells his lawyer that he has changed his mind about an insanity plea.

  On June 22, inside a closed courtroom and against his attorney’s advice, he pleads guilty. He arrived at this decision, he explains, because he received a message from God.

  The judge allows Assistant DA Sullivan to question him.

  “This is your own decision?”

  “It is my decision,” Mark replies, “and God’s decision.”

  Mr. Sullivan has more questions—about voices, prayer, and religion. Mark plays along accordingly.

  “Why do you use hollow-point bullets?” Sullivan asks.

  “To ensure Lennon’s death.”

  Back at prison, he refuses to see anyone, including Gloria, who has traveled all the way from Hawaii for the trial. He shaves his head and tears up his Bible and stuffs the pages into his toilet. He destroys a radio and a TV. He jumps around his cell, manic, and screams at everyone that they’re going to hell.

  That he’s possessed by a demon.

  It’s all reported vividly in the papers and on the news.

  Now it’s time to receive his sentence.

  On the morning of August 24, he puts on his bulletproof vest and dresses for court. The turnout, he keeps hearing, will be like nothing the world has ever seen.

  It’s going to be a beautiful day.

  “Is there anything you’d like to say?” Judge Dennis Edwards Jr. asks him in court.

  He pulls out a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and reads a section—a quotation from the main character, Holden Caulfield.

  “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all,” Mark says, his heart swelling. “Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

  Mark knows they don’t understand the passage, don’t understand him—how, like John Lennon, he has become this generation’s voice, the one to speak out about phoniness and corruption. They lack the ability to understand, and he can’t be angry at them. They lack his superior intelligence.

  Judge Edwards says he must serve a minimum of twenty years. After that, he is eligible for parole.

  What follows next is testimony regarding his mental state. He tunes it out, has nothing more to say.

  He has promised never to speak again.

  He is taken to a maximum-security cell.

  He sits on his new bed. Closing his eyes, he takes in a deep breath.

  Here, he will be protected from the ugliness of the outside world. People will bring him food. Books. He’ll have all the time he could ever want to read, watch TV. To think.

  It’s wonderful.

  The cell door slides shut and locks.

  Mark David Chapman smiles.

  I’m home.

  Notes

  Prologue

  Well, if you get a .22: Jack Jones, Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon (New York: Villard Books, 1992), 192.

  The safest way to transport: Associated Press, “How John Lennon’s Killer Mark David Chapman Brought Legal Gun to NY 35 Years Ago,” Syracuse.com, December 8, 2015.

  his thoughts turning to the five bullets: In this scene and others without available firsthand accounts, the reflections or words of Mark David Chapman and the people he interacts with have been reconstructed based on available third-party sources and interviews.

  changes in air pressure: E. R. Shipp, “Chapman Given 20 Years in Lennon Slaying,” New York Times, August 25, 1981.

  “I’m a recording engineer”: James R. Gaines, “Descent into Madness,” People, June 22, 1981.

  “I’m working with John Lennon and Paul McCartney”: Gaines, “Descent into Madness.”

  bag of coke: Gaines, “Descent into Madness.”

  “But I’d plug him anyway”: Gaines, “Descent into Madness.”

  “I’m Mark Chapman”: Gaines, “Descent into Madness.”

  Chapter 1

  “a great fellow”: Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (New York: Ecco, 2008), 103.

  “You lose a mother—and you find a guitar?”: Hunter Davies, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 28.

  If you can sing or play an instrument: Editors of People, The Beatles: Celebrating Beatlemania, America 1964 (New York: Time Home Entertainment, 2019), 28.

  a fat schoolboy: Norman, John Lennon, 108.

  “Like I’m writing an essay or doing a crossword puzzle”: Robin Hilton and Bob Boilen, “All Songs +1: A Conversation with Paul McCartney,” All Songs Considered, NPR.org, June 10, 2016.

  He’s drunk: Barry Miles, The Beatles Diary Volume 1: The Beatles Years (London: Omnibus Press, 2001), 11.

  He’ll get you into trouble, son: Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 32.

  You saw him rather than met him: Editors of People, The Beatles, 28.

  Chapter 2

  “We never get auditions because of the jazz bands”: Hunter Davies, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 60.

  Bill Haley and His Comets: “The Startling Blast of ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ Sixty Years Later,” David Cantwell, The New Yorker, July 27, 2015.

  “A guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never earn a living by it”: Warren Hoge, “Liverpool Journal; The House That Can’t Forget a Boy with a Guitar,” New York Times, May 6, 2003.

  “I wanted to write Alice in Wonderland and be Elvis Presley”: Ray Connolly, Being John Lennon: A Restless Life (New York: Pegasus Books, 2018), 31.

  you’ll regret it when I’m famous: Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (New York: Ecco, 2008), 67.

  gingery hair: Mark Lewisohn, Tune In, vol. 1, The Beatles: All These Years (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013), 181.

  “It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line”: Connolly, Being John Lennon, 39.

  “They’ll eat you alive if you start playing rock ’n’ roll in the Cavern!”: Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (New York: Back Bay, 2006), 65.

  Cut out the bloody rock ’n’ roll: Spitz, The Beatles, 65.

  New Clubmoor Hall: Lewisohn, Tune In, 144–45.

  “It wiped me out as a lead guitar player”: Paul McCartne
y, interview by Roger Scott, Capital Radio (London), November 17, 1983.

  “John, your little friend’s here”: Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 44.

  “John and Mimi had a very special relationship”: Lewisohn, Tune In, 14.

  “I think she quite liked me”: Lewisohn, Tune In, 14.

  “taking the mickey”: Philip Norman, Paul McCartney: The Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2016), 74.

  drawing gorgeous girls for toothpaste posters: Lewisohn, Tune In, 137.

  “Front porch, John Lennon, front porch”: Norman, Paul McCartney, 82.

  “the echo of the guitars”: Barry Miles, The Beatles Diary Volume 1: The Beatles Years (London: Omnibus Press, 2001), 12.

  Paul Anka used in his hit “Diana”: Austin O’Connor, “10 Things You May Not Know About Paul Anka,” AARP, April 17, 2013.

  Chapter 3

  Face up to your dad!: Mark Lewisohn, Tune In, vol. 1, The Beatles: All These Years (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013), 149.

  “Can you give me guitar lessons?”: Lewisohn, Tune In, 14.

  Chapter 4

  “holding a mirror up”: Philip Norman, Paul McCartney: The Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2016), 83.

  “I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular”: Hunter Davies, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 13.

  “eyeball to eyeball”: Mark Lewisohn, Tune In, vol. 1, The Beatles: All These Years (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013), 11.

  “I’d either sit down with a guitar or at the piano”: Robin Hilton and Bob Boilen, “All Songs +1: A Conversation with Paul McCartney,” All Songs Considered, NPR.org, June 10, 2016.

  “I’ve got a mate who can play ‘Raunchy’”: Lewisohn, Tune In, 150.